How to build a more peaceful mind in an ever more chaotic world

I am seated comfortably in my sunroom, feet flat on the floor, spine straight but not stiff, gaze lowered. Nobody is home, it’s quiet, and I am ready.

A soft voice—male, British, smooth—fills the room with gentle instruction, a laptop Hal of soothing reassurance. He’s telling me to take in “any and all sensations, moment by moment” that I feel in my feet. I register the nubby texture of the rug, a slight numbness in my left toes. This is easy. I can do this. My eyes rest on a dark smear by the window, where the pane meets the sill. Could be mold. Is moisture getting in? How old are these windows? Twenty years at least. Yeah, Karl was learning to walk... Crap. Meditation is hard.

A Thinking Man’s Guide to Not Thinking

From jet contrails to baseball stats to flirting strategies to irregular moles to nagging deadlines and tuition bills and squeaky brakes and, now, window mold, my mind has been busy-busy-busy for half a century. That busyness has kept me awake when I wanted to sleep, distracted when I wanted to focus, off somewhere else when I just wanted to be where I was—with my family, at my job, with my friends. Yes, I’d love to free myself from that 24-7 onslaught of thought.

Quieting minds is Mark Williams’s specialty. Williams, a clinical psychologist at the University of Oxford, wrote the script for the audio file I’m listening to, a Web supplement to his book Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, written with journalist Danny Penman. His prescription—for an elevated mood, a quieter mind, a more productive work life, and improved health—is “mindfulness meditation.” It’s a grown-up, sensible, regularguy type of mental exercise, one that doesn’t require incense, tubular bells, or sitting cross-legged murmuring a mantra. (Here are the 10 Best Yoga Poses for Men.)

At least since the Beatles returned from India, meditation has been a serious field of research, one that has yielded measurable results. A study from the University of North Carolina found that after a 9-week course, people had an increased sense of purpose and fewer feelings of isolation (yeah, yeah) but also fewer headaches and less congestion. Snot—now there’s a yardstick. In another study, University of Wisconsin scientists found that people who’d meditated produced more antibodies in reaction to a flu vaccine than a control group did. “The flu vaccine was working better in folks who’d done 8 weeks of mindfulness meditation,” Williams says.

Meditation also appears to help the heart and head. The National Institutes of Health funded a study review that noted a 30 percent decrease in cardiovascular mortality among meditators. Depression, Williams’s field, seems a good target for meditation therapy—and indeed, in a U.K. study, a mindfulness course cut people’s likelihood of relapse by 40 to 50 percent.

Richard Davidson, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin looked at people’s brains, too, using EEGs. When we’re angry or anxious, our right prefrontal cortex lights up with electrical activity more than the left side. The left side turns on its party lights when we’re happy and energetic. So Davidson could look at your EEG, check the right-to- left ratio, and call your mood.

When Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts medical school, put some biotech workers on an 8-week course in meditation, the workers’ prefrontal cortex ratios shifted to the upbeat left. Even when the researchers tried to make them sad by using depressing music or photos, brain scans indicated that the workers “approached” the sadness, dealt with it, and moved on instead of dwelling on it. The workers claimed they were happier and less anxious, and the EEGs bore this out. (You can also change your diet to beat depression. See what's the best brain food out there.)

“Even relatively short amounts of practice—2 months— are sufficient to produce a measurable change in brain function,” Davidson says. “Those changes in brain function are associated with changes in behavior that are beneficial, such as decreased anxiety and increased well-being, and with changes in certain peripheral biological measures—that is, biology below the neck that may be helpful for health.”

Better physical health would be gravy. But the true promise of the program is the ability to silence the noise inside your head so you can focus on and enjoy your life. In Mindfulness, Williams prescribes a simple, practical path of small steps, starting with sitting and breathing and mild stretching. Other tentative steps, like sitting in a different chair for breakfast, induce a tug of awakening. This “habit release” is a big deal in the course—it’s a gentle way of making you look at things in a new way, literally and figuratively. I soon understand why researchers prefer the word “mindfulness”; it’s a more precise descriptor. “Meditation” is vague, inward. Mindfulness is about paying attention.

Training the Brain to Think Better

The idea is that paying attention to your body and your immediate surroundings—instead of to all the crap swirling around your brain—has restorative power. Williams’s explanation that thoughts aren’t reality triggered my inner eye roll. Wow, man. But damn if it didn’t start to make sense. For example, my nighttime thoughts about a work deadline or broken dishwasher were just that—thoughts. But my breathing, this bedsheet, that toe, were real. Focus on those real sensations, he says, and the abstract thoughts about things that have happened and things that might happen can’t find purchase. And the mind rests.

“A lot of people have the idea that meditation is about clearing the mind,” Williams says. It’s not; it’s about seeing things more clearly. “If we gradually begin to recognize the old pattern of mind—those distractions coming up—we begin to see the old habits of mind. And we begin to take these things less seriously.” It’s okay if the mold under the windowsill works its way into my thinking; the point is not to empty my mind “but to acknowledge the thoughts, let them come and go like clouds in the sky, and allow the physical sensations—breath, touch, awareness of the body”—to return. (Does work have you frantic? Try these 15 Easy Ways to Beat Job Stress.)

A cluttered mind is endemic in modern Western society, Williams says. “The mind has been so well trained to solve problems, to think its way out of problems,” he says, “that its thinking mode switches on even when that actually doesn’t help.” Paradoxically, shutting down your problem-solving brain helps you resolve dilemmas, Williams says. “It’s a bit like a mathematician who goes over and over a problem without success,” he explains, “and then takes a walk and suddenly hits on the solution—when he stops thinking about it.” (I may try this at home: “Not loafing, dear, just switching from cognitive to sensory!”)

The problem-solving mode is a nasty loop, he says—we constantly refresh a worry and then dive back into trying to solve it, fueling more worry. “But if you move into the sensory mode, you don’t have to suppress what’s going on in your thinking. By switching to sensory mode, you starve the thinking of the fuel it needs. So it naturally tends to just wind down by itself.”

I tell Williams that passages in his book reminded me of being a little kid, lying in the backyard, staring at a blade of grass, mind essentially empty of thought.

“I think you’ve discovered it,” Williams says. “When we meditate, we’re not learning something new; we’re actually getting out of our own way to recapture something we have within us.”